Philip Youssef

I recently decided to take a swing at learning Scala. The following summarizes why I found the language interesting enough to look at and some excellent learning resources.Why scala?

Type inference.When the type for an element is obvious, the Scala compiler is able to automatically make the inference. No need for any additional type annotations. Less typing is great (pun intended).

StrongStatic typing. As fun as dynamic typing can be, I'm sick of running into type mismatch related bugs in rails. Coupled with inference, you can catch the bugs early with the compiler and write less code.

I find the premise here brilliant. Scalatron teaches you Scala while you program the AI to compete in a virtual arena game. Play against the computer or other people's bots as you level up your Scala skills.Coursera

Scala school started as a series of lectures at Twitter to prepare experienced engineers to be productive Scala programmers. Geared towards seasoned programmers, it does a great job of exposing the various aspects of the language through concrete examples. It's comprised of 13 lessons, start with the basics and you'll be building a distributed search engine by the end.Learn in small bites

The unofficial "best practices" guide for Scala. Definitely worth a look once you've gone over the basics.Wish me luck as I learn! What has your experience with Scala been? What resources do you rely on for reference and learning?